January 5, 2018

In 2017, the predominant reason companies considered moving
to the Cloud changed multiple times.
While the “how” tends to shift frequently, seeing the “why” fundamentally shift
twice in one year was fascinating (though not quite as fascinating as yesterday
when LinkedIn suggested I might know both Jessica Alba and Ashton Kutcher).

The Cloud will save us
money

2017 started off with companies moving to the Cloud to save
money. This makes sense in a theoretical sense: you pay-as-you-go for your
software instead of all up-front, you don’t have to buy your own servers,
there’s no need to do installations, and there’s no IT staff needed to handle
the frequent maintenance that an on-premises solution requires.

But while that’s 100% correct in the abstract (any new
company would buy Cloud first before ever considering an on-prem product),
there’s a sunk cost issue with existing solutions: companies already paid for
all their software (minus the annual “support maintenance”), they already
bought their servers, someone already installed the software, and there’s an
existing staff dedicated to maintaining servers that has plenty of other things
they can be doing once they stop dealing with the drudgery of daily maintenance
activities. While there’s money to be saved with new solutions, and there’s definitely
money to be saved in the long-run on converting existing implementations to the
Cloud, the short-term savings are trumped by the sunk cost fallacy.

As companies started moving en masse to the Cloud, a
compelling new motivation began appearing in Spring of 2017.

Let’s make our server
someone else’s problem

Companies began realizing that servers and data centers are a
huge headache: a distraction from their core competencies. Trying to make sure
servers stay up and running whenever we need to access them shouldn’t be any
more of a focus than starting our car: the engine should always work and if it
doesn’t, someone far more qualified than we are should fix it.

All of a sudden, people were going to the Cloud so they never
had to deal with their servers again: uptime was assumed, patches were someone
else’s problem, and backups just happened. And as this happened, the Cloud
became more like Google: when was the last time you pondered where Google’s
servers are located or when the last time was that Google did a backup? And the
reason you don’t invest brain power into Google maintenance thought experiments
is that it’s Google’s problem. While the Cloud may be causing someone else
sleepless nights keeping those servers up and running, that someone is not
making their problem your problem.

So, we spent the next several months of “The Year of the
Cloud” (trademark pending) going to the Cloud so we never had to deal with our
servers again.

Power to the People!

In late 2017, organizations going to the Cloud began to
notice something weird: business people were starting to own their own systems
and access their data directly. A noble aim long desired by users everywhere,
this has heretofore been impossible because on-premises systems take a lot of
effort to administrate. It took consultants or IT personnel to build the
systems, modify them, and in the end, those same people controlled access to
the systems.

The Cloud changed all that: with a new focus on end users and
self-service, the power to change things (add an account, build a new report,
modify a form, create new analysis) moved to the people who are the first to
know when a change needs to be met. At first, I thought this self-service
paradigm would increase the workload on the business, but it turns out that
they were having to do all the requesting of the changes anyway and quickly
making those changes themselves was far faster. Why should I have to make a
request to see my own data rather than just go wander through it on my own
(preferably on a mobile device)?

And so we ended 2017 with a new drive – a new “why” – of the Cloud. Give the power to
the people. The other reasons aren’t lost: they just took a backseat to the new
user-first world of the Cloud. Now when someone asks me “why should our company
move to the Cloud?”, I tell them “because it gives your business people the
power to make better business decisions faster.”

At least, that’s my answer at the start of 2018.

What’s the next shift?

Each year, I conduct a global survey of Business Analytics. Last year, I asked over 250
companies how they were doing in the world of reporting, analysis, planning,
and consolidation. If you want to see
where the next shift is coming from before it happens, I’m unveiling the
results of this year’s survey on a webcast January 31, 2018, at 2PM Eastern, where
you’ll learn how your BI & EPM (Business Intelligence & Enterprise
Performance Management) stacks up against the rest of the world. To register,
go to:

November 29, 2017

Screenshot from https://www.oracle.com/solutions/business-analytics/day-by-day.html

Companies spent most of 2017 either preparing their journey
to the Cloud, getting started on moving their applications to the Cloud, or
hoping the whole Cloud thing would go away if we just ignored it long enough
(like my late fees at Blockbuster). But in the end, the Cloud isn’t
revolutionary: the Cloud just means someone else is managing your server for
you. While it’s nice that your servers are now someone else’s problem, there is
an actual revolution happening in reporting & analysis and it’s a
technology that’s been around for decades.

The Future of Reporting
& Analysis Can Also Take Selfies

Up to this point, mobile has been an afterthought in the
world of reporting & analysis: we design for a laptop first and if
something ends up mobile-enabled, that’s a nice-to-have. The commonly held
belief is that mobile devices (phones, tablets) are too small of a footprint to
show formatted reports or intricate dashboards. That belief is correct in the
same way that Microsoft Outlook is way too complex of an application to make
reading emails on a mobile device practical… except that most emails in the
world are now read on a mobile device. They’re just not using Outlook. We had
to rethink of a smaller, faster, easier, more intuitive (sorry, Microsoft) way
of consuming information to take email mobile.

Reporting & analysis will also hit that tipping point in
2018 where we ask ourselves simply “what questions do I need answered to make
better business decisions faster?” and then our phones will give us exactly
that without all the detail a typical report or dashboard provides. Will mobile
analytics kill off desktop applications? No more than the desktop killed off
paper reports. They all have their place: paper reports are good for quickly
looking at a large amount of formatted information, desktops will be good for
details (Excel will live on for the foreseeable future), and mobile will take its
rightful place as the dominant form of information consumption.

Forget the Past and Pay
Attention to the Present

The greatest thing about mobile is that everyone has their
phone less than six feet from them at all times [you just glanced over at yours
to see if I’m right]. But would you ever look at your phone if your screen took
a month to update? Traditional reports are very backwards-looking. Your typical
Income Statement, for instance, tells you how you spent the last year, it
sometimes tells you about the upcoming forecast, but it rarely tells you, “am I
making money at this moment?” Just like the dashboard of a car would be awfully
useless if it gave you last month’s average gas tank reading – hey, I was 75%
full in December! – mobile reports won’t be for looking at historically dated
information. Instead, we’ll look to mobile to give us just the information we
need to take physical actions now.

But Why is 2018 the
Year of Mobile Analytics?

Quite simply, we didn’t have the technology to support our decisions
until now. While we could take reports or dashboards and interact with them on
mobile devices, we don’t want to actually perform analytics on our phones. We
want the computers doing the analysis for us. While we’ve had data mining for
years, it was relegated to high-priced data scientists or not-so-highly-paid
analysts.

We now have artificial intelligence that can look through our
data 24/7 and with no guidance from us, determine what drivers correlate with
which results. Machine learning can then determine which information it
delivers do we truly find useful. And so we don’t have to dig through all the
results to find out what the system is trying to tell us, the mobile analytics
apps in 2018 will convert complex information into natural language. It will
simply tell us in plain English (or your language of choice), “I looked through
all your information and here are the things you need to be aware of right
now.”

While that may seem like distant promises to many people,
it’s here now. At Oracle’s OpenWorld 2017 conference, there was an amazing
demonstration of everything I mentioned in the last paragraph. The audience was
even more amazed when told that all that functionality would be in Oracle
Analytics Cloud before OpenWorld 2018. I’m sure the employees of Microsoft,
Tableau, QlikView, and others are either busy working on their own technological
magic or they’re busier working on their resumés.

Am I Ready for the
Future?

Start finding out at EPM.BI/Survey. Each year, I conduct a
global survey of Business Analytics. Last year, I asked over 250 companies how
they were doing in the world of reporting, analysis, planning, and
consolidation. To participate in this
year’s survey, go to EPM.BI/Survey and spend 15 minutes answering
questions about your State of Business Analytics that you maybe haven’t thought
of in years. In exchange for filling in the survey, you’ll be invited to a
webcast on January 31, 2018, at 1PM Eastern, where you’ll learn how your BI &
EPM (Business Intelligence & Enterprise Performance Management) stacks up
against the rest of the world.

If you have any questions, ask them in the comments or tweet
them to me @ERoske.

May 1, 2017

Three days of Oracle’s Modern Finance Experience
set my personal new record for “Most Consecutive Days Wearing a Suit.”
Surrounded by finance professionals (mostly CFOs, VPs of FP&A, and people
who make money from Finance execs), I came prepared to learn nothing… yet found
myself quoting the content for days to come.

The event featured top notch speakers on cutting
edge concepts: the opening keynote with Mark Hurd, a panel on the changing
world of finance with Matt Bradley & Rondy Ng, Hari Sankar on Hybrid in the
world of Oracle EPM, and even one of my competitors (more on that in a second).

For those of you who couldn’t be there (or
didn’t want to pay a lot of money to dress up for three days), I thought I’d
share my top five quotes as best as I could transcribe them.

“IT currently spends
80% of its budget on maintenance. Boards are demanding increased security,
compliance, and regulatory investment. All these new investments come from the
innovation budget, not maintenance.”

-Mark
Hurd, Oracle, Co-Chief Executive Officer

Mark Hurd was pulling
double duty: he gave the opening keynote at Oracle HCM World (held at a nearby
hotel) and then bolted over to Oracle Modern Finance Experience to deliver our
keynote. He primarily talked Oracle strategy for the next few years which – to
badly paraphrase The Graduate – can
be summed up in one word: Cloud.

He gave a compelling
argument for why the Cloud is right for Oracle and businesses (though server
vendors and hosting providers should be terrified). Now let me be clear: much
of this conference was focused around the Cloud, so many of these quotes will
be too, but what I liked about Mark’s presentation was it gave clear, concise,
and practically irrefutable arguments of the benefits of the Cloud.

The reason I liked the
quote above is it answers the concerns from all those IT departments: what
happens to my job if I don’t spend 80% of our resources on maintaining existing
systems? You’ll get to spend your time on actually improving systems. Increased
innovation, greater security, better compliance … the things you’ve been
wanting to get to but never have time or budget to address.

“The focus is not on adding lots of new features to
on-premises applications. Our priority is less on adding to the functional
richness and more on simplifying the process of doing an upgrade.”

-Hari Sankar, Oracle, GVP of Product Management

I went to a session on the hybrid world of Oracle EPM. I
knew Hari would be introducing a customer who had both on-premises Hyperion
applications and Cloud applications. What I didn’t know is that he would be
addressing the future of Oracle EPM on-premises. As most of you know, the
current version for the on-premises Oracle EPM products is 11.1.2.4.x. What
many of you do not know is that Oracle has taken future major versions
(11.1.2.5 and 12c) of those products off the roadmap.

Hari spoke surprisingly directly to the audience about why
Oracle is not abandoning EPM on-prem, but why they will not be pushing the
Cloud versions and all their cool new functionality back down to the historical
user base. To sum up his eight+ minute monologue, the user base is not
requesting new functionality. They want simplicity and an easy path to
transition to the Cloud eventually, and that’s why Oracle will be focusing on
PSUs (Patch Set Updates) for the EPM products and not on “functional richness.”

Or to put it another way: Hyperion Planning and other
Hyperion product users who want impressive new features? Go to the Cloud because
they’re probably never coming to on-premises. To quote Hari once more, “create
a 1-3 year roadmap for moving to a Cloud environment” or find your applications
increasingly obsolete.

“Hackers are in your
network: they’re just waiting to pull the trigger.”

-Rondy Ng, Oracle, SVP of Applications
Development

There was an
entertaining Oracle panel led by Jeff Jacoby (Master Principal Sales Consultant
and a really nice guy no matter what his family says) that included Rondy Ng
(he’s over ERP development), Matt Bradley (he’s over EPM development), and
Michael Gobbo (also a lofty Master Principal Sales Consultant). While I
expected to be entertained (and Gobbo’s integrated ERP/HCM/EPM demo was one for
the ages), I didn’t expect them to tackle the key question on everyone’s mind:
what about security in the Cloud?

Mark Hurd did address
this in his keynote and he gave a fun fact: if someone finds a security flaw in
Oracle’s software on a Tuesday, Oracle will patch in by Wednesday, and it will take an average of 18 months until
that security patch gets installed in the majority of their client base.
Rondy addressed it even more directly: if you think hackers haven’t infiltrated
your network, you’re sticking your head in the sand.

Without going into all of
Rondy’s points, his basic argument was that Oracle is better at running a data
center than any of their customers out there. He pointed out that Oracle now
has 90 data centers around the world and that security overrides everything
else they do. He also said, “security is in our DNA” which is almost the exact
opposite of “Danger is my middle name,” but while Rondy’s line won’t be getting
him any dates, it should make the customer base feel a lot safer about letting
Oracle host their Cloud applications.

“Cloud is when not
if.”

-David Axson, Accenture, Managing Director

I have to admit, I have
developed a man crush on one of my competitors. I wrote down more quotes from
him than from every other speaker at the event put together. His take on the
future of Finance and Planning so closely paralleled my thoughts that I almost
felt like he had read the State of Business Analytics white paper we wrote. For instance, in that white paper, we wrote about
Analysis Inversion: that the responsibility for analyzing the report should be
in the hands of the provider of the report, not the receiver of the report.
David Axson put it this way: “The reporting and analysis is only as good as the
business decisions made from it. In finance, your job starts when you deliver the report and analysis. Most people think
that's when it ends.”

The reason I picked the
quote above is because it really sums up the whole theme of the conference: the
Cloud is not doing battle with on-premises. The Cloud did that battle, won with
a single sucker punch while on-prem was thinking it had it made, and Cloud
currently dancing on the still unconscious body of on-prem who right now is
having a bad nightmare involving losing its Blackberry while walking from
Blockbuster to RadioShack.

David is right: the
Cloud is coming to every company and the only question is when you’ll start
that journey.

So, what can we do about
all these changes coming to Finance? And for that matter, all the changes
coming to every facet of every industry in every country on Earth? Rod Johnson
(which he assures me is his not his “stage” name) said it best: don’t fight the
change but rather embrace it and make sure you can change faster than everyone
else.

"Change comes to those who wait, but it’s the ones bringing
the change who are in control."

-Edward Roske, interRel, CEO

To read more about some
of those disruptive changes coming to the world of Finance, download the white paper I mentioned
above.

May 23, 2016

Regardless of industry, regardless of size, regardless of
duration, all companies have similar issues in their financial analysis,
planning, and consolidation areas. From building budgets to financial reporting,
how can CFOs, VPs of Finance, Directors of FP&A and Controllers tell if
their FP&A teams are falling behind their competitors? Here are seven signs
that your Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) environments are stuck in the
last decade:

Strategy is planned verbally or in
spreadsheets. While
the majority of strategic CFO’s agree that Finance should be looking forward
and not backward, most strat planning is done in Excel or worse, out loud in
various meetings. There is no modeling unless someone comes up with a bunch of
linked spreadsheet formulas. Strategies are agreed to in conference rooms and
conveyed at a high-level via email (or they aren’t communicated at all).
Strategies are evaluated by whomever has the best anecdote: “well, the last time
that happened, we did this…” The only thing worse than not having a solution
for strategic planning is not doing strategic planning at all. Speaking of
spreadsheets…

Excel is the key enabling technology
in your FP&A department. One sure way to tell if your EPM function is falling behind is to ask
“what is the single most important tool your department uses when running
reports? Performing analysis? Coming up with a strategic plan? Preparing the
budget? Modeling business changes?” If the answer to four-out-of-five of those
is “Microsoft Excel”, ask yourself if that was by design or if people just used
Excel because they didn’t have a better system. Excel is a wonderful tool (I
open it every morning and don’t close it until I leave), but it was meant to be
a way to look at grids of data. It was not meant to store business logic and it
was never meant to be a database. Force your FP&A group to do everything
with Excel and expect to be waiting for every answer… and then praying everyone
got their formulas right when you make business decisions based on those
answers.

There is only one version of the
budget. No one
really thinks that there’s only one way that the year will end up, but most
companies insist on a single version of a budget (and not even a range, but a
specific number). Not only are EPM Laggards (companies with EPM trailing behind
their peer groups) not planning multiple scenarios, they’re insisting that the
whole company come up with a single number and then stick to it no matter what
external factors are at play. Ron Dimon refers to scenario plans as “ready at
hand plans” waiting to be used once we see how our strategic initiatives are
enacted. EPM Laggards not only don’t have additional plans ready, they insist
on holding everyone in the organization accountable to one single number,
outside world be damned.

Budgets favor precision over
timeliness. Your
competition realizes that a forecast that’s 95% accurate delivered today is
more helpful than a budget that was 98% accurate 6 months ago. Yet EPM Laggards
spend months coming up with a budget that’s precise to the dollar and then
updating it periodically at a high level. It’s amazing how often FP&A
groups end up explaining away budget vs. actual discrepancies by saying “the
budget was accurate at the start of the year, but then things happened.”
Budgets should be reforecasted continuously whenever anything material changes.
Think about it: if you had one mapping app that gave you an estimate of your
arrival time to the 1/100th of a second at the time you departed and
another mapping app that constantly refined your arrival time as you drove,
which one would you choose?

No one takes actions on the reports. Edward’s Rule of Reporting: every
report should either lead to a better question or a physical action. If your
department is producing a report that doesn’t lead someone to ask a bigger,
better, bolder question and doesn’t lead someone to take a physical action,
change the report. Or stop producing the report entirely. EPM Laggards spend an
inordinate amount of time collecting data and generating reports that don’t
lead to any change in behavior. EPM Leaders periodically stop and ask
themselves “if I arrived today, is this what I would build?” Half the time, the
answer is “no,” and the other half the time, the answer is “if I arrived today,
I actually wouldn’t build this report at all.”

Most time is spent looking backwards. Imagine you’re driving a car. Put
your hands on the wheel and look around. Notice that most of your visual space
is the front windshield which shows you what’s coming up ahead of you. Some of
what you see is taken up by the dashboard so you can get a real-time idea of
where you are right now. And if you glance up, there’s a small rear-view mirror
that tells you what’s behind you. A combination of all three of these
(windshield, dashboard, and rearview mirror) gives you some idea of when you
should steer right or left, brake, or accelerate. In a perfect EPM world, your
time would be divided the same way: most would be spent looking ahead
(budgeting and forecasting), some time would be spent glancing down to
determine where you are at the moment, and very little would be spent looking
backwards since, let’s face it, the past is really difficult to change. In your
car, you’d only look at the mirror if you were changing lanes or you were
worried about being hit from behind, and business is similar yet most EPM
Laggards drive their cars by looking backwards.

Labor is devoted to collecting & reporting and not planning &
analyzing. If you
spend all of your time gathering data, reconciling data, and reporting on data,
you’re answering the question “what happened?” Your competition is spending
their time analyzing (“why did this happen?”) and then planning to take action
(“what should I do next?”). There is a finite amount of time in the world and
sadly, that holds true in our FP&A departments too. If your EPM system is
focused on collecting, consolidating, & reporting and your competition has
their EPM focused on analyzing, modeling, & planning, who do you think will
win in the long run?

What You Can Do

If you look at those seven top signs you’re lagging in your
EPM functions and wonder how to improve, the first step is to stop building
anything new. While this seems counterintuitive, if you take a tactical
approach to solving any one area, you’re going to put in place a single point
solution that will need to be thrown away or redone as you get closer to your
overall vision for EPM. So what’s step 1? Have an EPM vision. Ask yourself
where you want your company to be in three years. What do you want out of
consolidation, reporting, analysis, modeling, and planning and how will all of
those functions be integrated?

You are not alone. I have seen hundreds of FP&A
departments in my time struggle with having a vision for just one area let
alone a long-range vision. Even when leadership has a vision, it quite often
focuses on system improvements (we’re not sure what to do, so let’s throw
technology at it!) rather than try to improve processes too. Thankfully, there
is hope and as my good friends at G.I. Joe always say, knowing is half the
battle.

More Information

If you have any questions, ask them in the comments or tweet
them to me @ERoske.

November 27, 2015

Since early 2015, we've been trying to figure out how to help educate more people around the world on Oracle BI and Oracle EPM. Back in 2006, interRel launched a webcast series that started out once every two weeks and then rapidly progressed to 2-3 times per week. We presented over 125 webcasts last year to 5,000+ people from our customers, prospective customers, Oracle employees, and our competitors.

In 2007, we launched our first book and in the last 8 years, we've released over 10 books on Essbase, Planning, Smart View, Essbase Studio, and more. (We even wrote a few books we didn't get to publish on Financial Reporting and the dearly departed Web Analysis.) In 2009, we started doing free day-long, multi-track conferences across North America and participating in OTN tours around the world. We've also been trying to speak at as many user groups and conferences as we can possibly fit in. Side note, if you haven't signed up for Kscope16 yet, it's the greatest conference ever: go to kscope16.com and register (make sure you use code IRC at registration to take $100 off each person's costs).

We've been trying to innovate our education offerings since then to make sure there were as many happy Hyperion, OBIEE, and Essbase customers around the world as possible. Since we started webcasts, books, and free training days, others have started doing them too which is awesome in that it shares the Oracle Business Analytics message with even more people.

The problem is that the time we have for learning and the way we learn has changed. We can no longer take the time to sit and read an entire book. We can't schedule an hour a week at a specific time to watch an hour webcast when we might only be interested in a few minutes of the content. We can't always take days out of our lives to attend conferences no matter how good they are. So in June 2015 at Kscope16, we launched the next evolution in training (epm.bi/videos):

#PlayItForward is our attempt to make it easier for people to learn by making it into a series of free videos. Each one focuses on a single topic. Here's one I did that attempts to explain What Is Big Data? in under 12 minutes:

As you can see from the video, the goal is to teach you a specific topic with marketing kept to an absolute minimum (notice that there's not a single slide in there explaining what interRel is). We figure if we remove the marketing, people will not only be more likely to watch the videos but share them as well (competitors: please feel free to watch, learn, and share too). We wanted to get to the point and not teach multiple things in each video.Various people from interRel have recorded videos in several different categories including What's New (new features in the new versions of various products), What Is? (introductions to various products), Tips & Tricks, deep-dive series (topics that take a few videos to cover completely), random things we think are interesting, and my personal pet project, the Essbase Technical Reference.

Yes, I'm trying to convert the Essbase Technical Reference into current, easy-to-use videos. This is a labor of love (there are hundreds of videos to be made on just Essbase calc functions alone) and I needed to start somewhere. For the most part, I'm focusing on Essbase Calc Script functions and commands first, because that's where I get the most questions (and where some of the examples in the TechRef are especially horrendous). I've done a few Essbase.CFG settings that are relevant to calculations and a few others I just find interesting. I'm not the only one at interRel doing them, because if we waited for me to finish, well, we'd never finish. The good news is that there are lots of people at interRel who learned things and want to pass them on.I started by doing the big ones (like CALC DIM and AGG) but then decided to tackle a specific function category: the @IS... boolean functions. I have one more of those to go and then I'm not sure what I'm tackling next. For the full ever-increasing list, go to http://bit.ly/EssTechRef, but here's the list as of this posting:

To see all the videos we have at the moment, go to epm.bi/videos. I'm looking for advice on which TechRef videos I should record next. I'm trying to do a lot more calculation functions and Essbase.CFG settings before I move on to things like MDX functions and MaxL commands, but others may take up that mantle. If you have functions you'd like to see a video on, shoot an email over to epm.bi/videos, click on the discussion tab, and make a suggestion or two. If you like the videos and find them helpful (or you have suggestions on how to make them more helpful), please feel free to comment too.I think I'm going to go start working on my video on FIXPARALLEL.